Are London IB hours too easy??

Hi, I know that there is a huge difference between NY and London about paid holidays but was reading the thread about London Ib bonuses and a lot of people were posting pretty good hours for an Ib analyst role. So are London IB hours generally better than the NY ones?

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Third year IBD analyst in London here, hours vary a lot depending on project but if I was to try average it out:

Monday to Thursday: 9am - 10.30pm (although ranges from 9pm to 3am depending on how busy) Friday: 9am - 7pm (my team has a good culture we try all leave by 7pm for beers on Fridays) Weekends: depends how busy we are, to put it in perspective I’ve worked the past 4 weekends in a row, but before that I didn’t work a weekend for 6 weeks in a row Holiday: we get 4 weeks holiday per year but unless you’re loved by your seniors, you normally have to cancel holiday a few days before you’re due to leave I.e in 2019 I only took 1 week of holiday during the entire year as I had to cancel every other time a few days before due to projects

Hours were much worse during my first year but this is my experience as a senior analyst

 

Don't fool yourself. I interned for a BB in London and everyone told me the IB hours were going to be "wayyyy easier" than NYC. This was literally completely wrong. The hours were just as bad in London - if not worse. Many of the Analysts and Associates I spoke to were up until 3-4 am a few times a week and no one was taking more than 2 weeks of vacation. Maybe it was just my team but IB in London is definitely not easy.

 

Hard to give an average

AN1

Slow week: 10an - 9pm weekdays with 30% of it spent waiting around, still reconnect at midnight to reply to a couple emails, almost no WE work (just emails)

Week where something blows up: 9am - 1/4am weekdays + 10-30h+ WE work


Average maybe 9am-0am but in reality most of the time it’s either a slow week or a hardcore week (either sth blows up or it doesn’t, at the same time I’m not pushing hours unnecessarily tbh)

So in terms of hours “at the desk” maybe 60 to 110h is a good range, with effective work hours being less 

 

I think generally it should get better as you’re not doing the grunt work past midnight, however in my firm associates have so much on their plate right now (because everybody is staffed on multiple deals) that they work very long hours 

 

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